After hours of trouble shooting and exchanges with the help desk, finely reached a knowledge person who said that there is an outage with incoming calls in the 609 and 856 areas. Would have been nice to see some posting on this forum or on twitter! At least all of the help desk staff should have been aware and stated this some 12 hours ago when I first submitted the trouble ticket.

Outages happen and are at time uncontrollable, but spreading the word is expected.